Kenya’s community health system is structured into 9,500 community health units, each unit has a population of about 5000 people and is served by about 10 community health promoters (CHPs). The CHPs are supervised by Community Health Assistants (CHA) and each unit has a community health committee governance team which has a membership of 5-7 people drawn from the local community. Various policies and documents have been developed by the ministry of health (MOH) to guide the implementation of community health services in Kenya. The ministry of health (MOH) Kenya is currently working with partners and stakeholders to implement the Community Digitalization Strategy (2020- 2025), the strategy aims to strengthen the delivery of primary health care services through the digitalization of community health services.
In 2019, Kenya’s MOH carried out a landscape assessment to identify the community health digital tools that existed, through the landscape assessment and analysis process; the community health toolkit (CHT) was selected as a platform of choice to power Kenya’s electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS). To help provide a standardized way to deliver quality community health services, in 2021; the Division of Community Health Services (MOH-Kenya) worked with partners to design and develop eCHIS v1.0 which was piloted in Kisumu county. Later on, eCHIS v2.0 was developed in 2022 based on eCHIS v1.0 user feedback and other additional emerging needs. The eCHIS v2.0 app supports household registration, service delivery, client referral to health facilities, messaging, data visualization, performance management and the app has been integrated with Afya-KE (EMR), client registry and KHIS systems.
The MOH Kenya has partnered with various implementing partners to support the roll out of eCHIS to various counties in Kenya. As of September 2023, the eCHIS had been deployed to 5 counties and over 13,000 CHPs are actively using the tool to provide community health services. To ensure sustainability of the eCHIS program, the national government is co-financing this program with the county governments. There is also a digital health bill which is under development and once it is enacted, it will help to provide a legal framework that will guide the eCHIS implementation process.
Thank you John Wanyungu (Deputy Head, Division of Community Health - MOH-Kenya), @philip and @Mercy_Amulele for the great presentations on eCHIS Kenya. The recording of the September 2023 MOH Kenya eCHIS community story presentation is available here